How can the humanities inform the comparative biology of human nature?

To what degree, and how, are human brains unique? To what degree, and how, are human brains not unique? And how would we know? These epistemological questions are – or, rather, should be – at the core of understanding what it means to be human in a post-Darwinian world. Scientific inquiry into the putative uniqueness of human brains must take seriously our evolutionary past so as to grapple with our joint status as humans and yet also as animals. But guiding assumptions in too much of biomedical and biological research are effectively non-evolutionary. Either scientists think of brains a-evolutionarily – as organized pretty well the same across species, such that one can stand in for another (neuro-similarity); or they think of evolution as linear – from ‘simple’ (rat brains) to more ‘complex’ (human brains) (neuro-simplicity). This state of affairs has seriously hampered the exploration of brain development and evolution over the past century. The humanities – especially bioethics and the history and philosophy of science – have much to offer in response. Unpacking the evolutionary history of humans comparatively with that of other animals is critical to the task of understanding the (putative) uniqueness of human brains, and our evolutionary origins as humans. As a Seminar Fellow, my project is to explore the epistemological, methodological, and ethical dimensions of what it would mean to take evolution seriously in contemporary neuroscience, and so to reveal the deep secrets of the comparative biology of human nature.